


Danny

by tiffany rawlins (wearemany), wearemany



Category: Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
Genre: Books, F/F, F/M, Mystery, Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2005, recipient:Minerva McTabby
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-12-25
Updated: 2005-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-16 03:12:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/167805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wearemany/pseuds/tiffany%20rawlins, https://archiveofourown.org/users/wearemany/pseuds/wearemany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Yes, once even Mrs. Danvers must have been young.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Danny

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Minerva McTabby (McTabby)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/McTabby/gifts).



Not long after we left Manderley, I saw a young woman with high cheekbones and an unnaturally slender face. If Mrs. Danvers had ever been young, and I was not entirely convinced she had not entered life at an advanced age, she could have been this girl.

We were in Holland. The young woman wore a black blouse and a slim skirt, and I would not have made anything more of it if not for the white jacket that she carried, folded over her arms. It looked like an apron, the kind a maid or housekeeper would wear. She gave a sharp glance at the waiter, who had carelessly set the cup on her table, splashing tea into the saucer. Her look bore bright hatred, and that was when the similarity presented itself.

She never glanced at me, nor at Maxim, and though we were not as overlooked as we would become, we were quickly learning to travel with a certain unobtrusive grace. I believe that day we toured a tulip garden and sat at dinner with some minor local official who was temporarily lodging at the inn while his house was under repair.

I did not point out the girl's strange familiarity to Maxim. Those months we lived together at Manderley were like a series of horror tales told by a wicked older brother. Mrs. Danvers, Jack Favell, even Rebecca -- they could no longer hurt us unless we let them. I was determined not to let them.

We were only at that inn for a week, and Maxim had caught some cold coming over from Norway. I took to walking down some of the streets where gallery after gallery displayed their most coquettish wares, and on a sunny afternoon I saw the young woman again. Perhaps this was what Mrs. Danvers looked like in her youth, long decades before she herself came to Manderley and so many years before my presence shattered her calm, chilly despair.

Yes, once even Mrs. Danvers must have been young, must have gone to school with a belt around her books. Even before she raised Rebecca, she must have been old enough to worry which young men might fancy her. Maybe one had called upon her, had been less deserving than her father had hoped, had been turned away. And Mrs. Danvers -- or Danny, maybe it wasn't Favell's or even Rebecca's nickname but an older, familial one -- Danny would have sobbed into her pillow and vowed to leave as soon as she was able.

Perhaps there was an advertisement, a polite notice inquiring for young misses to care for the child of a London couple. Rebecca had breeding, someone had said, breeding, brains and beauty, so she'd have had a nursemaid, a nanny already. But she would have acted out even as she matured, overstepping as she learned to hone that manipulative genius that would serve her so well for so long.

"Some extra attention will help," Rebecca's mother would have said when Danny came around to answer the ad. "She's the kind of girl who ought have been born a boy and so she will lash out some at the normal rules." And there was Danny, nodding and reassuring the mother how difficult her own nieces and nephews were, for whom she had cared many times, and never with any great trouble.

"This is a good, solid candidate," the mother would have thought. "This Danvers girl will be just what Rebecca needs, just what will make the difference." Danny wouldn't have been all that much older than Rebecca, maybe a dozen years, would have easily skated into being an accomplice rather than guardian. It wouldn't have taken long for Rebecca to become aware of Danny's feelings, of how Danny was not at all like any other nanny the girls at school had. She was indulgent where she should have been stern, impressed where she should have been horrified, entranced where she should have been concerned.

That story Mrs. Danvers told me, with the unbroken horse and Rebecca's cruel, disciplinary cuts -- that memory would have been early, devastatingly shocking. Danny would have known nearly right away what she'd done wrong, what she had allowed Rebecca to control.

She would not have cared. Already she would have known Rebecca trusted her above all the others, all the silly, stupid men. Rebecca would never have made jokes about Danny, never called her names based on one physical defect or another. "How else do you propose I remember which is which?" she'd have asked Danny, throwing her hair back and laughing. "I'd be better off naming the rosebushes. They at least will give me something I like."

Danny would laugh, because Rebecca always made her laugh, and reach for the hairbrush to bring her girl's hair to its full shine. "They don't know how to touch a girl," Rebecca would have said, catching Danny's wrist on a downstroke. "Even these silly fools who have never done a hard day's work have fingers like sandpaper. Not like yours, Danny. So soft. So sure of how to --"

And the brush would have slipped from Danny's hands. With any other girl she'd have feigned shock, but this was Rebecca, her Rebecca, her Rebecca unlike any other in the world, and nothing else Danny had learned before applied when it was just her and her Rebecca.

Maybe Danny never cared at all what the boys at her school thought. Maybe there had been a girl, another dark-haired, strong-armed girl who drew boys to her like the tide to the shore. Maybe she never noticed Danny, never cared for her, never bothered to include her in anything.

Maybe Rebecca held Danny's arm tight, finger bone against wrist bone, her grip hard and intense, and her hair flicked across Danny's hand as Rebecca twisted around, tilted her face up, drew Danny down to her.

"Miss?"

A hand on my elbow stopped my imagination cold, and the tiny street came rushing back, the stores and the cafe and a hotel porter with a frown between his eyebrows. All the thousand details of a tiny forgettable street in Holland on top of the lingering taste of Danny and Rebecca was too much, too many thoughts to hold and continue to breathe properly. I lost my balance and the porter caught my hand before I fell, the frown now deepened to something just shy of fear.

"I'm all right," I insisted, and disentangled myself. I stood straight and stiff, willing the image of strength. "See? I'm really fine. Just had the silly idea to skip lunch and wander about, but really --"

The porter tried to make me come into the lobby, to sit and call Maxim to come get me.

"No, please," I said. "I'll just walk back to our inn. It's almost time for tea, anyway."

He smiled indulgently at that, as so often we were greeted, the more bemused the further we got from England and its inviolable customs.

Maxim was waiting in the restaurant when I returned, leafing through one of my novels, something I'd bought to pass the time on the boat but never bothered to read. It was the kind of book that Mrs. Van Hopper read on boats and as soon as I'd realized that I'd lost my taste for it. Maxim looked content enough, but his attention was split, one eye on the door.

"There you are," he said, and no matter what I missed of England, of Manderley, there was now the smug, selfish rush of his obvious dependence. "I thought I might send out a search party."

"No, no, I'm sorry to be late," I said, and kissed his cheek before settling into the chair he held out.

Only after we were settled, the tea poured, the butter cookies set out in equal portions, did he speak again. Our teatime conversation was as rationed as each careful sip, those moments of starched civility another way we held on to the lives we no longer lived. "Did you have a great adventure? Meet a fascinating stranger, perhaps? Or --"

"No. Actually it was rather boring."

"We could go on to Geneva, if you like." Maxim laid his hand over mine on the narrow table, and the warmth of his skin was reassuring, familiar. Maxim was my home now, and I his, and wandering down dark paths was another habit we had left behind.

"Yes, let's," I said. "Let's keep going."


End file.
